Recently I have been asked several questions concerning an animal. One question was what could be chewing on an aluminum ladder? This was easy to answer: a porcupine. The porcupine’s large incisor teeth enable it to eat aluminum signs, cans, plastic, salt, grease, soap, glue in plywood, pressure treated wood, animal bones and deer antlers. In one night, a porcupine can eat one pound of food.

The second question was how can a person determine the sex of a porcupine? Since I believed this question was a joke, I thought very carefully before answering. I was a little embarrassed when I found out the man was serious. Porcupines do not have external sex organs and determining the sex of an adult porcupine must be done internally.

However, handle them at your own risk.

In a Smithsonian study, it was found impossible to tell the sex of a newborn porcupine. The Smithsonian veterinarians discovered that to determine the sex of a newborn porcupine DNA testing was done on the quill.

I’m often asked if a porcupine can throw its quills and the answer is No. Another question asked is are they born without quills? The answer is no. Young porcupines are born fully quilled.

At birth a young porcupette will weigh approximately one pound and measure approximately 12 inches in length; eyes are open and incisor teeth are well developed. The quills, which are about a quarter of an inch long, are soft and flexible and dry within the hour, and fur is underneath the quills.

In the fall, I often received calls from callers wanting me to identify a sound they had heard in the woods. The sound was described as a loud shrieking call followed by another animal calling from a distance away. The caller always commented that these were extremely eerie sounds. The eerie calls continued until it seemed the two animals met up with each other.

These calls were made by male and female porcupines as part of their mating ritual. Usually porcupines are silent animals, however during the breeding season (September-December), they grunt, groan, shriek, bark and whine to attract each other. These calls are often heard up to a quarter of a mile away.

When two porcupines meet, they face each other, rub noses, gnash their teeth, stand on hind legs and scream at one another. Body movements, which could appear as if the two were dancing, are performed. Before mating, the male showers the female with urine. Unlike many mammals, the males do not fight over females.

The gestation period is 205-217 days, which is longer than the period for white-tail deer. Almost seven months after breeding, the female will give birth to one young. April, May and June are the months when the young are born, with this wide variation due to the breeding season being so long in the fall. Although there is a long breeding season, it is reported that up to one half of all adult females can go unmated in any given year.

The porcupine belongs to the rodentia family, which also includes mice, squirrels and beaver. The name porcupine comes from two Latin words, porcus, meaning swine, and spina, meaning thorn. The scientific name is erethizon dorsatum, which means the irritable back.

Although porcupines do not hibernate, they do den up for the winter months and the same den could be used year after year. A dead giveaway to a porcupine’s den is a pile of droppings found at the entrance. A porcupine could leave its den, on a sunny winter’s day, to climb a tree to feed upon the bark, and perhaps stay in the tree for several days before returning to its den.

Due to the porcupine’s strange diet, the droppings, which resemble little wooden briquettes, are full of wood fibers. I read in one book that a porcupine creates between 75-200 droppings a day. Except for the beaver, which always defecates in water, the porcupine’s scat cannot be confused with that of any other animal.

The life expectancy of a porcupine is 10-12 years. Even though these animals are protected, hunting is permitted during designated seasons, however hunting is prohibited at night. Many porcupines are killed by people that have had either property damage or fear an encounter with their dogs.

The porcupine walks flat-footed with a top speed of about two miles per hour, which is the reason that many are hit by vehicles. If you are ever tramping through Penn’s Woods and encounter a porcupine, there are 30,000 reasons why you should leave it alone.

Bill Bower is a retired Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Officer. Read his blog and listen to his podcasts on the outdoors at www.onemaningreen.com.